Lee Le Fever, the founder and principal of the famous Common Craft video’s announced today at Twitter that the Google Reader team had hired Commoncraft to create this one minute introduction to Google Reader. (@leelefever on twitter)

It is an ultrashort but clear presentation in the well-known “Explanations in Plain English style”.

For those not familiar with Google Reader (an RSS-reader), it might be nice to see how this works. If you want to know more about RSS first see this post (again with a CC-video)

The Commoncraft video doesn’t show the new feature of Google Reader, that you can see the average posts per week and the number of subscribers, as I learned today from Gerard Bierens at Twitter. I didn’t see anything at first, but Gerard showed me that you have to look at the Expanded View Tab and click Details (see Figure).

If you’ve taste for more free learning/web2.0 tools, have a look at this 101 Free learning Tools Slide from Zaidlearn. One of the 101 Tools is Google_reader. Each slide has a link to the website where you can get/try the tool. There is more on slideshare and on Zaidlearn’s blog.

Last but not least my Belgian colleague Patrick Vanhoucke(again at Twitter) gave the nice tip of a new free music library grooveshark.com, that resembles LastFM, except that it doesn’t stop after 30 seconds. There is even a possibility that you can sell your music via grooveshark (you can load your music and if someone loads it you receive “credits”). The Grooveshark tip was not really a learning tip, but it might make learning somewhat more pleasant. You can read more here (Dutch)